Measurement of Evidence and Evidence of Measurement

Abstract

One important use of statistical methods in application to biological data is measurement of evidence, or assessment of the degree to which data support one or another hypothesis. While there is a small literature on this topic, it seems safe to say that consensus has not yet been reached regarding how best, or most accurately, to measure statistical evidence. Here, we propose considering the problem as a measurement problem, rather than as a statistical problem per se, and we explore the consequences of this shift in perspective. Our arguments here are part of an ongoing research program focused on exploiting deep parallelisms between foundations of thermodynamics and foundations of “evidentialism,” in order to derive an absolute scale for the measurement of evidence, a general framework in the context of which that scale is validated, and the many ancillary benefits that come from having such a framework in place.